1/9 (literaturnoe prilozhenie k gazete 1/10), 1992 no. 1, pp. 2-7, 1992 no. 2, pp. 3-8
Article about the love affair between and the literary destinies of the poets Sergei Esenin and Nikolai Kliuev in the literary supplement to the gay newspaper 1/10
Post-Soviet
1992
This article, like a number of documents in this component of the sourcebook, is the product of a revisionist impulse to restore a figure unfairly marginalized for their expression of homosexual desire to their rightful place in history and a cultural, in this case literary, canon.
In their effort to bridge the gap between an early post-Soviet present and a pre-Soviet moment before the poet Nikolai Klyuev ran afoul of official Soviet arbiters of aesthetic taste, the author casts that earlier moment almost as one of a kind of prelapsarian purity. Klyuev’s homosexual desires, for which, it is implied, the Soviet state apparatus will ultimately destroy him, seem to be of a piece with an kind of elemental, pure Russianness, which is in turn inextricable from a kind of religiosity (that of the Khlysts) — another disparaged category in the Soviet worldview. For some early post-Soviet exponents of LGBTQ identities an impulse to access something elementally Russian as a fundamental part of that identity formation led to expression of Russian-religious and in some cases Russian-nationalist sentiments.
Presented in juxtaposition is the poet Sergei Esenin, a darling of the early-Soviet literary milieu, whose suspected romantic or quasi-romantic entanglement with Klyuev has long been the object of scholarly speculation and interest. Esenin is presented as the lesser talent enjoying greater popularity in a less enlightened cultural moment — the moment marking the beginning of the interruption of the culture and spirituality with which the author here wants to reconnect. It is worth observing that a vehement antipathy for the expression male homosexual desire was also typical of the often emphatically religious and vigorously anti-Soviet Russian émigré enclaves that tended to view themselves as the guardians of and heirs to a Russian national culture scattered by the Bolshevik Revolution. Russian literature scholar and cultural historian Simon Karlinsky (mentioned in notes for other documents in this collection — “Homosexuality in Soviet Prisons and Camps,” “Valerii Pereleshin” — and author of the document “The Unknown Sergei Diaghilev”) led something of an embattled career as a champion of exponents of LGBTQ identities in Russian literature and culture and an advocate of restoring effaced LGBTQ elements in the study and teaching of the Russian cultural canons. These efforts encountered strong resistance from members of the Western academy and members of Russian émigré communities who regarded these as attempts by fringe interests in the West to artificially impose their own proclivities on the Russian cultural legacy.
Yesenin, Sergei and Klyuyev, Nikolai
Russia
1/9: literaturnoe prilozhenie k gazete 1/10, 1992, no. 1, pp. 2-7, 1992 no. 2, pp. 3-8